Although spatial data users may not be aware of the inherent uncertainty in all the datasets they use, it is critical to evaluate data quality in order to understand the validity and limitations of any conclusions based on spatial data. Spatial data uncertainty is inevitable as all representations of the real world are imperfect. This topic presents the importance of understanding spatial data uncertainty and discusses major methods and models to communicate, represent, and quantify positional and attribute uncertainty in spatial data, including both analytical and simulation approaches. Geo-semantic uncertainty that involves vague geographic concepts and classes is also addressed from the perspectives of fuzzy-set approaches and cognitive experiments. Potential methods that can be implemented to assess the quality of large volumes of crowd-sourced geographic data are also discussed. Finally, this topic ends with future directions to further research on spatial data quality and uncertainty.

Spatial interaction (SI) is a fundamental concept in the GIScience literature, and may be defined in numerous ways. SI often describes the "flow" of individuals, commodities, capital, and information over (geographic) space resulting from a decision process. Alternatively, SI is sometimes used to refer to the influence of spatial proximity of places on the intensity of relations between those places. SI modeling as a separate research endeavor developed out of a need to mathematically model and understand the underlying determinants of these flows/influences. Proponents of SI modeling include economic geographers, regional scientists, and regional planners, as well as climate scientists, physicists, animal ecologists, and even some biophysical/environmental researchers. Originally developed from theories of interacting particles and gravitational forces in physics, SI modeling has developed through a series of refinements in terms of functional form, conceptual representations of distances, as well as a range of analytically rigorous technical improvements.
 

Local multivariate statistical models are increasingly encountered in geographical research to estimate spatially varying relationships between a response variable and its associated predictor variables. In geography and many other disciplines, such models have been largely embedded within the framework of regression and can reveal significantly more information about the determinants of observed spatial distribution of the dependent variable than their global regression model counterparts. This section introduces one type of local statistical modeling framework: Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). Models within this framework estimate location-specific parameter estimates for each covariate, local diagnostic statistics, and bandwidth parameters as indicators of the spatial scales at which the modeled processes operate. These models provide an effective means to estimate how the same factors may evoke different responses across locations and by so doing, bring to the fore the role of geographical context on human preferences and behavior.